Anyone who owns a website knows very well that he must take care of SEO NYC activities to try to appear among the first results of the Google search ranking. Getting to get a position on the first page of search engines means being able to get a lot of traffic to your site and, which does not hurt, also the opportunity to monetize with sales or affiliate systems.
The result is neither easy nor immediate to obtain but requires a lot of effort and the consistency to frequently publish quality content that interests web users.
Beside the contents it is essential to carry out the analysis of the site often, or rather, to be precise, the SEO analysis of the site pages. In fact, each page can position itself better or worse on Google.
The analysis of the individual pages will help us optimize them to improve those that receive the most visits and to start working even those that do not generate traffic.
The SEO analysis activity of a website is called in technical jargon SEO Audit.
How SEO is done for websites
But how do you analyze a site? It’s difficult? Should you turn to a professional or might you be able to do it yourself?
SEO is a complex matter, but at the same time the basic principles that allow you to carry out a first analysis of the sites, can be made your own by studying the topic. Having said that, for an in-depth analysis it is certainly necessary to resort to a SEO specialist , who rightly will require his right honorarium.
But today, thanks to dedicated tools available on the internet also for free, the blogger who knows the basics of the subject, can succeed in the business of improving his website, at least in the easiest critical issues to solve.
There are several online analysis tools . Some for a fee and others for free. In this article we will see the best tools and software for SEO analysis of a website in circulation.
The Tools
All the articles I find on the net usually begin with the title: “the best free online tools for SEO site analysis”. Beautiful title if it were not that punctually, within those articles we find at most a free analysis tool (and also explained in a small and incomplete way) and then the usual roundup of paid software that allow you to take advantage of one or two searches at day by returning incomplete data for another. These are not free tools: they are tools that only if used after subscribing to a subscription are able to give you complete information.
So I will start with the tools to make SEO Audit completely free online and then gradually we will also get to know the paid ones.
Before proceeding, however, give me one last clarification: what is the SEO analysis of a website.
Analyzing the SEO of a website consists in verifying a whole series of factors that must be optimized in order to be in line with what the search engines require (Google above all) to be indexed and positioned. It is no coincidence that the word SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, terms by which we mean Optimization for Search Engines.
And it is precisely the lack of optimization that the analysis tools highlight with their reports.
After the dutiful and long preamble, let’s discover the SEO tools for online website analysis.
Free online SEO analysis tools
I start without fear of meeting the contrary opinion of most NYC SEO Company, from the free tool called “SEO Tester Online” (https://www.seotesteronline.com/).
It is one of the most complete and reliable SEO Audit tools because, in addition to highlighting the gaps of the web pages on the code side, it also signals other very important factors such as the speed of page loading.
Once you reach the home page, all you have to do is enter the url of the page to be analyzed and wait a few moments for the analysis to be completed.
As a first screen, the tool will assign a total score to the SEO of the analyzed page, highlighting the optimization status on a pentagon-shaped graph. From this graphic you will immediately have a precise idea of the most critical points for the SEO of your website. If the score is high, the graph will be green. Orange and red highlight critical issues. The score ranges from 0 to 100.
Always from the same page, the site will be displayed on a Smartphone and tablet, which is useful for quickly checking whether the site is responsive.
The second TAB is called “Base”. Basic because the site is analyzed for basic optimization: the search preview, the meta description, the titles, the header tags, the url, the robots.txt and the sitemap.
Examine this section very carefully because, whatever you say, these elements are still very important for positioning on search engines . Optimizing “onsite” SEO represents building a good foundation for your project.
The third TAB (Content) returns information on the optimization of the contents, taking into consideration the keywords present on the page, the titles, the page size (heavy page = slow loading), the ALT attributes on the images and the micro data. Here we enter a highly debated field. Does this information need to be taken into account? Do these dictates have to be respected to the letter?
The first answer is YES and the second is NO.
Today, optimizing a website no longer means filling a text with keywords in an attempt to position the page. Rather, research intent needs to be identified and answers are given to them. The concept of keywords remains valid for identifying those words that express the search intentions, but no more than this.
SEO tester Online measures obsolete values such as Keywords Density or Title Tags, when it is shown that they no longer have any impact on SEO.
But this does not mean that the “content” section must be skipped. For example, knowing that micro data has not been implemented correctly on the page is useful for remedying the lack. Knowing that the main search key is not present in your title tag is certainly useful for the same reason. We don’t snoop keywords; we only learn to use them differently.
In addition, from this section of the site analysis you can identify the images with the missing ALT tags and if you need to lighten them for faster loading times.
And it is precisely the speed of loading of the pages of the site that SEO Tester Online analyzes in the fourth TAB (Speed). From what I seemed to understand, this information is taken directly from the Google Page speed Inside tool, because from the same results and the same suggestions for correction. So it means that it is reliable.
We finish the examination of this excellent tool with the fifth TAB (Social), which deals with seeing if the Open Graph for Social Networks, Twitter cards and social plug-in are implemented on the site. In a future where Google goes in the direction of rewarding the popularity and authoritativeness of a site, social signals must be taken into consideration and we should all implement Open Graphs on the site.
SEORCH ( https://seorch.eu/ )
I like Seorch very much. Not many know it and it is not praised as SEO Tester Online but I use it frequently in equal measure. It can be found at https://seorch.eu
It is another nice free tool. Here too you will need to enter the url of the page you want to analyze and then click on the “Check” button. If you want you can also enter a keyword in the appropriate field, to check the optimization of the site page with respect to it.
If SEO tester Online returns the analysis in 5 comfortable and clear TABs, SEORCH instead returns the data vertically and has the advantage of being able to download the test report in PDF format.
In the first section (SEO On Page) the tool returns information on the status of the title and the meta description. Then it returns the length of the text present in the body of the page and then the count of the links, highlighting on these, if the title attribute is missing.
Subsequently (SEO Off Page section) it also gives a sort of report on the incoming links, based on data from www.backlinktest.com. Don’t fool yourself though. The instrument returns highly approximate and incomplete data.
Scrolling you can have data on the social activities of the analyzed page, such as shares on Facebook and on Google Plus.
The Semantic Analysis section is interesting, which carries out the semantic analysis of the texts, returning as a result the degree of readability of the text and the most relevant keywords present on it.
Within this section we also find the structure of the header tags to check if we have made the right nesting between h1, h2, h3, etc.
And yet the SEO of the site is put under the magnifying glass of this free online tool (and for this beautiful), with the analysis of the implementation of the alternate text on the images, the use of Semantic Tags, of the HTML5 language, micro data, Open Graph and more.
The next section proceeds with the technical analysis of the SEO of the website taking into consideration the weight of the page, the W3C errors and the correct implementation of the robots.txt, the Canonical tag, the hreflang, the gzip compression, the sitemap, the use of css and js to be reduced, minified or put outside the HTML code.
Very valuable function, it also signals if the canonical url is the only one to answer and if the equivalent but not canonical url are correctly redirected towards it.
If you shake a little more, continue the analysis with the verification of the display of the mobile version and then with the analysis of the loading speed of the pages.
Finally, it makes a list sorted by frequency of appearance of the keywords in the text of the page, reaching up to 4 words in the same sentence, good for optimizing long tails .
But could you have a correct overview of the SEO of a website if you do not consult the Google Search Console? Absolutely not.
Google Search Console
It is true that Google Search Console notoriously returns values that are difficult to understand, but with a little experience, this free tool allows us to obtain more information about the SEO NYC status of our website.
Performing an analysis with the Search Console requires a little trained eye because sometimes, what the written words do not say, we can learn from the images.
The Search Console is full of SEO analysis tools that go to examine several factors. In the first section, “Appearance in research”, we find the analysis of “structured data”, indispensable elements to help Google understand more easily and quickly what our page is about and create the link between the various entities on the web.
Below we find the item “HTML improvements” where problems of duplication of titles and contents not indexed by Google for some strange reason are highlighted.
Then it is possible to obtain an estimate of the search traffic passing through our site, which keys have activated our page snippets, the links we receive on the site (which if they are toxic, it will be necessary to get rid of them with the appropriate Search Console tool, Disavow Link ), usability on mobile devices and page loading speed.
In the index section of Google we will be able to see how many pages have been indexed or if there are blocked urls.
The next section, called crawling, gives you the opportunity to see if there are crawling errors (for example if there are no longer existing pages that respond with a 404), a graph that shows us how the Google crawler crawls our website , the test for the robots.txt file and the possibility to send a sitemap to Google and at the same time check if there is any error to be corrected on this.
In short, the Search Console will not be a very complete tool but used together with the 2 tools mentioned above, you can get REALLY FREE, the pulse of the situation on the state of optimization of our websites.
Other tools
SEMRush
Of course it is obvious that by purchasing a subscription to paid tools such as SEMRUSH just to mention one of the best, you can make less effort.
SEMRUSH analyzes the site for us, creates reports, suggests what to do to improve the SEO NYC and search engine rankings of our sites, and tracks the history and many other fantastic things. A professional SEO must necessarily have such a tool in his toolbox.
If SEMRUSH allows an in-depth analysis of the SEO OnPage and the positioning achieved (in addition to allowing you to prepare a plan to improve a whole series of factors that lead to the positioning and increase of traffic to the site), there are online tools more suited to SEO OffPage analysis and in particular in keeping track of incoming links (whether natural or the result of a link building campaign ):